Animals and the Shaping of Modern Medicine

Abigail Woods, Michael Bresalier, Angela Cassidy

• Publisher: Springer Open
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319643366
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as 'human' medicine was in fact deeply zoological. Each chapter analyses an important episode in which animals changed and were changed by medicine. Ranging across the animal inhabitants of Britain's zoos, sick sheep on Scottish farms, unproductive livestock in developing countries, and the tapeworms of California and Beirut, they illuminate the multi-species dimensions of modern medicine and its rich historical connections with biology, zoology, agriculture and veterinary medicine. The modern movement for One Health – whose history is also analyzed – is therefore revealed as just the latest attempt to improve health by working across species and disciplines. This book will appeal to historians of animals, science and medicine, to those involved in the promotion and practice of One Health today.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Centring Animals Within Medical History
• Chapter 2 Doctors in the Zoo: Connecting Human and Animal Health in British Zoological Gardens, c.1828–1890
• Chapter 3 From Coordinated Campaigns to Watertight Compartments: Diseased Sheep and their Investigation in Britain, c.1880–1920
• Chapter 4 From Healthy Cows to Healthy Humans: Integrated Approaches to World Hunger, c.1930–1965
• Chapter 5 The Parasitological Pursuit: Crossing Species and Disciplinary Boundaries with Calvin W. Schwabe and the Echinococcus Tapeworm, 1956–1975 Rachel Mason Dentinger
• Chapter 6 Humans, Other Animals and ‘One Health’ in the Early Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 7 Conclusion
• Appendix: Annotated Bibliography of Animals in the History of Medicine
• Index